Índex per October 2023 a PC Pro

Do you have a minute? Or to be more precise: do you have five minutes and 51 seconds? If so, check out a brilliant teardown video by the folk at iFixit (pcpro.link/349ifixit), which denudes the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 (see p68). In that short time, you’ll see both what an amazing job Samsung’s engineers have done with the design and also why the hinge remains so vulnerable. There’s a reason that the phone isn’t rated against dust ingress, and that’s because dust loves gaps and hinges need them to work. The reason I originally searched for a teardown video had nothing to do with dust, but because I wondered exactly what was stuffed within this innovative device. I’ve been a curious observer of foldable phones ever since Chinese company Royole…

There’s a gold rush under way in Silicon Valley. Since the explosion of ChatGPT at the end of last year, the entire tech industry has been racing to catch up and cash in on the large language model (LLM) AI boom. Within weeks, Microsoft spent $10 billion to invest in OpenAI, the company behind GPT. Google has spent untold millions on its own AI, named Bard, and reorganised its AI division. And though it has remained characteristically tight-lipped, Apple has reportedly lavished billions on its own LLM, too. What’s clear, then, is that AI models are not just incredibly powerful, but valuable, too. This makes Mark Zuckerberg’s contribution to the AI space all the more surprising. Meta, née Facebook, has of course developed its own LLM. But instead of keeping…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He has an aspect ratio of roughly 4.6:1, when standing and viewed from the front at least. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk I don’t know whether it’s just me becoming a grouchy old man, but TV adverts seem to have become more imbecilic over the past year or two. One that particularly saddens me is when that girl sees someone using a Samsung Flip phone and is so overcome with consumer-lust that she runs away to join “the flip side”. Editor-in-chief Tim recently asked as a “masthead question” whether we editors were tempted by such bendy phones and what would make us buy one, to which I replied: “The Galaxy Z Fold tempts me for use as a camera, and what would make me buy…

Fold or hold? I acquired the Galaxy Z Fold3 on launch two years ago, thinking by then the issues had been resolved. I found the concept brilliant. For the first time I could use the phone to work on spreadsheets or read documents much more effectively than on conventional phones. With the long warranty on screens, this seemed to bode well. In use, the fold didn’t bother me; noticeable, but not an issue. Unfortunately I had the internal screen fail twice in the year, and the external screen protector also replaced. Nonetheless the replacement service worked very well, and the repairs took place at my premises with minimal downtime. Then came the Z Fold4. This was the phone the Z Fold always should have been: no flaky screen protector, and…

If you fired up Google Chrome today and the version that first launched in 2008, you’d struggle to tell them apart. The address bar runs along the top, there’s a row of bookmarks underneath, a few basic buttons to the left, tabs at the top, and that’s yer lot. Has the way we use the web really not changed in 15 years? There are alternative browser makers out there who would strongly disagree. Google pioneered the fuss-free, feature-stripped browser in 2008 and the rest of its mainstream rivals followed. But there’s a new undercurrent of “power browsers” designed to satisfy users who want more from their web browser. Browsers with built-in email clients and feed readers, browsers that separate home and work life, browsers that don’t endlessly distract you from…

With a full-blown email client, calendar with offline access, RSS reader, task manager, notes app and lots more available through extensions, it’s tempting to ask whether Vivaldi is more of an operating system than a web browser. The company isn’t blind to the complexity of its offering. When you first install Vivaldi you’re given three layout options: Essentials, Classic or Fully Loaded. Essentials hides pretty much everything bar the basic browsing tools; Classic adds a few more advanced features, such as Web Panels (see opposite) and the browser’s fast-forward and rewind buttons; Fully Loaded gives you the lot. But if you’re looking for an apology from Vivaldi CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, for packing the browser with lots of different features, you’d best bring a good book; you’ll be waiting a…

One of the best uses for a smart speaker is as an on-demand jukebox. Amazon’s Echo devices integrate directly with both Spotify and Amazon’s own online music service, each of which offers a library of more than 100 million tracks. So you should be able to find almost everything you want. There are downsides to this arrangement, however. One is that you need to pay a subscription to get the best from these music services. On both Spotify and Amazon Music, free users can only request playlists, rather than specific songs; Amazon Prime subscribers can stream individual tracks from Amazon Music, but the service limits the number of times you can skip every hour, and insists on shuffling albums and playlists. For full control you need to pay £9.99 a…

Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra This 14.5in tablet is a great choice if you lean to productivity over creativity PRICE 256GB Wi-Fi, £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Over the next three pages, you’ll find reviews of all three of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab tablets. We devote most space to the S9 Ultra, but that’s only because its 14.6in screen is such a brilliant advert for the laptop-like productivity this trio of products offers. They all share the same processor and – even more crucially – the same software. For it’s this, rather than the stylish hardware, that sets the Galaxy Tab S9 family apart from its rivals. That may sound strange when the first thing that strikes you on gazing at the Ultra is the sheer size of its AMOLED…

Norton 360 Premium for £19.99 (10 devices for two years) SAVE 89% pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and to provide a way of watching British TV while abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton Password…

PRICE £124 (£149 inc VAT) from audio-technica.com This is a souped-up version of the Audio-Technica AT2020USB-X, itself an excellent USB microphone that costs £119. Both features that set the XP version apart are geared towards noisy environments, starting with noise reduction. Ambient noise is always hard to control, particularly if you have fans whirring in your PC; this mic provides three levels of reduction, all of which do a good job of retaining the timbre of the speaker’s voice. The automatic gain control is of lesser interest for most, but there are plenty of us who become rather loud when we get excited, and this feature does a good job of adjusting the mic volume on the fly to minimise distortion. There are three controls on the front of the…

PRICE 256GB, £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk If you’re not a fan of the Fold5 (see p68), why not Flip? However you prefer your hinges, Samsung has you covered, and this fifth-generation clamshell smartphone is its most mature and practical model yet. One big advantage of the Z Flip5 over the Z Fold5 is the price: it’s a huge £700 cheaper, and comes with 256GB of storage as standard, up from the Flip4’s 128GB. There’s also a 512GB option, with all sizes available in Mint, Graphite, Cream and Lavender, plus exclusive Grey, Blue, Green and Yellow finishes on Samsung’s website. Whichever colour you choose, you’ll only see it on the rear of the phone, since the front of the Galaxy Z Flip5 is almost entirely taken up by its…

PRICE 256GB, £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from sony.co.uk Sony’s Xperia 1 phones have always had a character of their own, and the new Xperia 1 V largely sticks to the formula. The squared-off slab shape is recognisably Sony, and it still sports a 3.5mm headphone jack on top – something most manufacturers ditched long ago. Prise out the SIM tray and you’ll find a microSD slot, which is also unusual in premium phones. And rather than following the fashion for in-display fingerprint readers, Sony sticks with a side-mounted scanner – although I found this wasn’t always reliable. Another thing that hasn’t changed is the oddball format, with its tall, ultra-sharp screen. A native resolution of 1,644 x 3,840 ensures you won’t see the slightest hint of pixellation, and colour and…

Choosing a VPN isn’t easy. Not only do the providers love to tie you into long-term deals, but it’s almost impossible for the casual buyer to work out which is best. Well, that’s what this Labs is here for. For a start, it’s written by KG Orphanides, an expert in the area who runs a VPN data-tracking website that’s regularly updated with performance speeds. So the comments here about speeds are based on months of testing, rather than a handful of file transfers. This month, you’ll find a detailed comparison of nine different providers (see our side-by-side feature comparison on p80). Not all win awards, but to reach these pages they have passed KG’s tough criteria. Dozens more fell by the wayside. We’re focusing on consumer VPN providers in this…

PRICE £10 per month, £48 per 6 months, £80 per year from expressvpn.com ExpressVPN is expensive, but the service comes with an excellent real-world security pedigree: after its servers were seized by Turkish authorities, no identifying data was retained. Since that incident, ExpressVPN, like Private Internet Access, was bought by Kape Technologies, a UK-based firm that owns numerous VPN providers and review websites. However, ExpressVPN remains an independent entity with its own infrastructure and retains its official headquarters in the British Virgin Islands. This is a privacy haven that doesn’t require VPN service providers to engage in logging or any other kind of data collection. There’s no reason to believe that ExpressVPN’s logging policy has changed since it was acquired. ExpressVPN charges in dollars but will show you the latest…

PRICE £8 (£10 inc VAT) per month, £27 (£32 inc VAT) per year, £54 (£65 inc VAT) for three years from privateinternetaccess.com US-based Private Internet Access (PIA) used to be the go-to name for anyone recommending a VPN provider, but its performance is no longer impressive compared to rivals. Plus, some VPN users and industry watchers remain sceptical following its 2019 acquisition by Kape Technologies. This company has bought a number of different VPN service providers and review websites, although these still operate as independent brands. They perform differently, too. PIA was the slowest in our latest tests, managing only 9Mbits/sec to a US endpoint compared to 200Mbits/sec and more from rivals. It also logged the slowest throughput in our UK and Netherlands speed tests, at 54Mbits/sec and 40Mbits/sec. Where…

PRICE Free (limited to 2GB per month), unlimited $10 per month, $60 per year, $120 per three years from tunnelbear.com Canada-based TunnelBear is a regular presence in VPN group tests, thanks to a solid reputation, a useful free tier, low-cost subscriptions and non-hyperbolic marketing that’s mostly based around bears. It’s been owned by McAfee since 2018 but we’ve seen no negative changes as a result. It’s consistent, albeit not remarkably fast. And while it offers fewer connection options than most rivals, you can use its OpenVPN configuration profiles for servers, Linux PCs and select routers. When it comes to embracing changes, TunnelBear is sleepy. It only just completed its rollout of the WireGuard protocol to macOS and Android, joining Windows and iOS, making it one of the last big names…

PRICE 1-500 systems, perpetual licence, £10 each exc VAT from netsupportmanager.com SMBs that want the best on-premises remote support solution need look no further than NetSupport Manager (NSM). Now well into its third decade, NSM has been continuously updated, with version 14 on review providing a redesigned Control interface, support for Windows 11 and Server 2022 clients plus two-factor authentication (2FA) and SSL/TLS certificates to tighten up access security to remote systems. Licensing couldn’t be any easier: pricing is based only on the number of supported systems. You don’t need to worry about subscriptions, either, with perpetual licensing for up to 500 systems costing a straight £10 each. Installation is a breeze. We loaded the Control component on a Windows 10 host and used the separate Deploy tool to scan…

PRICE 1-500 users, billed yearly, $2.99 per month per user from analytics-365.com The move to remote and home working has driven a huge demand for communication and collaboration services, and none more so than with Microsoft’s Teams, which now boasts 300 million users worldwide. That’s a lot of people, and for businesses to get the best value from their Teams subscriptions, they must be able to see how staff are using it and whether it’s working as intended. A raft of analytics tools are available, including plenty integrated into Teams itself, but Tollring’s Analytics 365 stands out as it’s capable of providing deeper insights into internal and external Teams activity. Many of the built-in Teams analytics tools are scattered across its Admin Center portal and desktop app, but Analytics 365…

Even for experienced enthusiasts, the ability to dig ourselves out of technological mishaps is no longer a given. In the Windows 98 era, there were a myriad of simple tricks to be tried should a P-ATA drive lose a shoe. Windows 8 introduced “Refresh your PC” to reset an OS without data loss and, years later, the matured self-healing technology within Windows is as dependable as a cat’s promise to stay off the furniture. When the OS breaks, there’s a significant chance that the system recovery system is also stuffed. It’s a double slap in the chops for the user. Not only has the machine croaked, but the damn thing can’t do anything about it. I’ve had lots of “I’m not angry at you, but…” conversations with frustrated Windows users,…

That generative AI is now a thing cannot have escaped your attention. No matter what line of business you’re in, it’s either being heralded as a game-changer or dismissed as just another over-hyped disruptor tech. I happen to be in both the security and media spaces, and my take falls firmly between these two extremes: it’s neither one nor the other. Yet. There’s quite a lot of overlap between tech journalism and security, as communicating facts in a clearly understandable way is key to both. This is where generative AI systems currently fall flat as far as I’m concerned. Sure, you can ask something like ChatGPT to write you a blog entry, a news story, a feature article, even a threat intelligence or incident report, and it will likely appear…

Ilove a good computer jumble fair. You never know what you might find, and there’s always the tantalising possibility of coming across something extremely rare that you’ve been hankering after for years. Even decades. So when I heard that the most excellent Centre for Computing History in Cambridge was going to be holding just such an event, it had to go into the diary. I agreed to meet David Moss, former contributing editor of this parish, there on the Sunday morning. He arrived on his motorbike and was somewhat nonplussed to see me arrive in our van. “Be prepared!” I exclaimed, for the unlikely event that I might pick up a bargain of an IBM mainframe. Or a Silicon Graphics workstation. Or two. And it’s a delight to meet up…

“Llama 2 has all of the air of a model that wasn’t finished yet,” said Simon Willison, describing how typically an AI model is trained over a period of weeks and weeks of data crunching, slowly getting better over time, with improvements becoming more marginal, the more it is trained. But he speculates that Meta may not have waited until it had perfected the model. “It looks pretty clear that they hadn’t got to the point where the graph stopped going down, but Zuckerberg was like, ship it, the time is now, you can ship another one later. So I think they rushed it out,” said Willison. “It really does feel to me like them saying ‘we are going to be one of the key companies in this new space’.”…

Nicole is PC Pro’s Futures editor. Don’t write in to tell her that people outside of London behave like this all the time already. She’s been past the M25, and y’all have just as many AirPods. @njkobie If you don’t want AI to take over the world then I have one simple suggestion: be more human. Figuring out what exactly that means is no simple task. To avoid your job being taken by robots, management consultants recommend doing work that is human-focused, taking on roles such as yoga instructor or care worker. But the flexibility and strength of yoga instructors is so far from my own bodily experience that Boston Dynamics’ robot dog could teach it and be more useful a reference. I can see the argument for human care…

What’s the date? I am much confused. Every year I normally find that October pops along after September, rather as day follows night follows day. However, I see that PC Pro has invented a new month of “Summer” to follow September, and yet by the end of September where I live it is usually autumn. This year, as far as I can tell, summer was in June when it was exceptionally hot, while now in August with the constant rain it is very like September. Except that was last month. Please explain. Editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: An excellent letter, which made me both laugh and then realise I should have put a note in last month’s Readers’ Comments to explain the Summer 2023 issue! As many readers will have long…

Arc is without doubt the fashionable browser of the moment, the browser that kids wielding MacBooks in Manhattan juice bars are using. I say MacBooks, because right now the browser is Mac only, although there are plans to release a Windows version later this year. Arc isn’t just the browser to be seen with, however. It brings fresh ideas to the table, including power features that PC Pro readers may well appreciate. Arc is created by The Browser Company, a startup co-founded by Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, both former Facebook employees. However, it’s another tech giant the pair have clearly got in their sights. Visit the Arc homepage and front and centre is a pull quote from The Verge’s review of the browser, proclaiming: “Arc is the Chrome replacement…

How do you make F1 more exciting? Danny Baker had the brilliant idea of making drivers do the first lap on foot, but that’s unlikely to go down well with Lewis Hamilton and co. Instead, ahead of the 2022 season, the F1 authorities decided to use the power of cloud computing to make races more competitive. Nobody wants to spend two hours of their Sunday afternoon watching cars file round a track in a procession – least of all the millions of fans drawn in by the deftly edited highlights shown in Netflix’s Drive to Survive. So, Formula One decided to change the rules, to enforce modifications to the design of the cars that would make it easier to overtake, inducing more of those moments that make Martin Brundle’s voice…

Part 1: How to create simple programs Even if you’re not a programmer, you’ve almost certainly heard of Visual Studio. Microsoft’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) includes everything required to create, test and deploy applications of all types and sizes, in a wide range of programming languages. It can even create cross-platform code to run on other operating systems. No wonder it consistently ranks as one of the world’s most used development environments. Visual Studio isn’t only for professionals, though. Casual hobbyists and beginners looking to take their first steps in coding can also benefit from Visual Studio features such as smart code-completion, error-checking and debugging features. It’s great for helping less experienced coders produce working projects with a minimum of fuss. Best of all, most people can use this…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. The pcpro.link Throughout the magazine you’ll see pcpro.link shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we have an affiliate deal in place so we will receive…

PRICE 256GB Wi-Fi, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Galaxy Tab S9+ begs one obvious question: why spend an extra £200 on this rather than the plain S9? One answer is that the S9+ has 12GB of RAM rather than 8GB, but more persuasive is that it’s available with 512GB of storage. The S9 stops at 256GB. Its extra girth makes the S9+ more awkward to hold in one hand. Not because it’s heavy – at 581g it weighs little more than the S9 –but because most people will struggle to hold it securely in one stretched paw. And while it is 0.2mm slimmer then the S9, I challenge anyone to spot that. Arguably, Samsung would have been better to distinguish the S9+ with a bigger battery and thus…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk At £999, the 14.5in Lenovo Tab Extreme is playing in the Premier league alongside the 12.9in iPad Pro (see issue 340, p84) and Samsung’s Tab S9 Ultra (see p56). This large tablet becomes even chunkier if you attach the optional Tab Extreme Keyboard, which bears a striking resemblance to Apple’s Magic Keyboard. When typing this review, I found the keyboard cramped for my big hands, but the keys are well spaced and have plenty of travel. We don’t yet have UK prices for the keyboard – it’s bundled in the US for $1,099 – but the £999 price includes a folio case and the Lenovo Precision Pen 3. This offers 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt detection, but with no force feedback…

PRICE Two pack, £127 (£210 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk (B0BJKZNK95) Where TP-Link’s Deco XE200 opposite takes a maximalist approach, the Asus ZenWiFi XD5 goes in the other direction. Rather than the fastest possible performance, it offers a decent Wi-Fi 6 network at an attractive price, via two or three boxy little stations that are small enough to hide away around your home. That’s not to say the XD5 units are unpleasant to look at. The rounded cuboid design is clean and modern, with a subtle spiral pattern on top. The base of each station houses a multicoloured status LED, although this can’t be seen from all angles as it’s unhelpfully tucked away below the main body. Internally, the XD5 is a simple dualband mesh, with a single 5GHz radio connection…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. First, enter the issue number (349 this month). Next, enter your email address and the coupon code printed on the cover’s spine (or directly on the front cover of digital issues of the magazine). We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. Follow the instructions in the email to access the download area. 2 Once you’re in the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the…

PRICE 40mm, no 4G, £241 (£289 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The Galaxy Watch6 is an iterative upgrade on last year’s Galaxy Watch5 (see issue 338, p72), but it’s an upgrade nonetheless. That makes it Samsung’s best watch yet, and arguably the best smartwatch for Android users. As before it comes in 40mm and 44mm sizes, with either Bluetooth-only or 4G connectivity, priced to compete directly with the Apple Watch and Google’s Pixel Watch. The physical design is the same as the Watch5’s, with two multifunction buttons on the side and a touch-sensitive face for navigating through the watch’s various features. What’s new is a quick-release mechanism for the strap, which makes it easy to swap from, for example, classy black leather (which looks great) to the silicone sports band. The…

A virtual private network (VPN) is an encrypted connection from your device to a remote server. You may have encountered one in the workplace, allowing those working remotely to access an on-premises or cloud-based office network. But this month we’re looking at consumer VPN providers. These subscription-based services provide a way to artificially change your location. So you can access services, particularly video-streaming services, that are specific to a different country. Privacy is another major selling point for VPN services. Data going to and from your device through an encrypted link to a remote server can’t be inspected by your ISP or, typically, monitoring tools on a local network. So how do you juggle the various different factors to work out the right service for you? Read on. ■ Region…

PRICE €5 per month from mullvad.net Mullvad is a rare VPN that puts privacy ahead of all other concerns. If you’re looking to stream region-locked media, forward ports for a torrent tracker or get up to activities with a taint of potential dodginess, Mullvad isn’t for you. However, the company is a fierce proponent of online privacy. In April 2023, it went toe-to-toe with Swedish police with a server seizure warrant. Mullvad’s legal and technical teams demonstrated both its non-logging server infrastructure and the lack of any legal obligation for VPN providers to keep logs in Sweden, sending police away empty-handed. Mullvad is based in the country, and that’s where it retains an active legal team to deal with such eventualities, but it also monitors international affairs that could affect…

PRICE Free; £10 per month, £62 per year, £104 for two years from protonvpn.com With outstanding free and paid-for performance, ProtonVPN is consistently among the best-performing and most innovative VPN services that we review. And we’re pleased to note that it’s significantly simplified its pricing since we last reviewed it. Rather than multiple tiers with different features and levels of server access, you can now choose between a free account, a paid-for account and, if you want other services such as secure email and a password manager, a more expensive Advanced account (which is beyond the scope of this review). You can pay in euros, US dollars or Swiss francs, and that currently works out to around £10 per month, £62 per year or £104 for two years. That still…

PRICE £7.50 (£9 inc VAT) per month, £45 (£54 inc VAT) per year from vyprvpn.com VyprVPN’s corporate backend appears to be undergoing some restructuring. It was founded by Golden Frog, a Swiss-headquartered company set up by the founders of US-based Usenet provider Giganews, which also operated ISPs and hosting services. A Giganews subscription still comes with a VyprVPN account, which is the best-value way to get one if you want to pay monthly. Earlier this year, however, VyprVPN’s website was updated to indicate that it’s now a subsidiary of Certida, a US company that shares the “same vision” with Golden Frog and appears to include former Golden Frog staff. Neither Certida nor Golden Frog representatives responded to our request for comment. The transition appears to be undramatic, but means that…

PRICE First year, 50 computers, £172 exc VAT from remotepc.com IDrive has been our cloud backup provider of choice for many years, and its RemotePC service aims to offer the same appealing combination of features, value and simplicity. Even better, IDrive offers five versions so you can easily find the best fit for your budget and requirements. We reviewed RemotePC Team, which starts at a trifling £172 for the first year and supports unlimited users and up to 50 computers. It takes all the support features found in the consumer and SOHO versions and adds Active Directory (AD) and syncing support, single-sign on (SSO) and access to helpdesk functions. Creating new users is simple: you send email invitations from the RemotePC cloud admin portal, which asks users to set up…

PRICE Subscription, 10 host licences, £150 exc VAT per year from wisemo.com Wisemo is not so well known in the UK remote support market, which is a little surprising as it’s been in the game since 2010. Its hybrid Remote Control service is very versatile, and a subscription-based licence enables the myCloud cloud-hosted and on-premises support services so technicians can access hosts directly over the internet or LAN. You can have the best of both worlds, too: once the host app is installed on your endpoints, you can connect to them over the cloud from the myCloud web portal and use the technician’s guest desktop app to reach them directly over the LAN. The guest app is even more amenable; after registering it with your myCloud account, it offers both…

We’re hearing more and more about quantum computing, and you might be starting to wonder what value it could have for your business. The answer is far from clear, because good, practical information about this new frontier is hard to come by. I have to admit I rather enjoy a nice information gap. Computing in general is stuffed full of such things, especially when new, specialist technologies start to collide with a less cautious, more gung-ho marketplace. The general understanding of quantum computing (QC for short) doesn’t go much further than the social media-driven perception that it represents the end of conventional computational barriers – for the good guys and the bad equally – and that unimaginable leaps in performance are just around the corner for everything from tablets to…

You may remember that I waxed lyrical about my Flipper Zero device last year (see issue 338, p119), after I was one of the first in the UK to get my hands on the pen-testing hacker tool. My Flipper remains one of my favourite bits of hacking hardware, which is hardly surprising considering it’s something of a Swiss army knife tool. Sure, there’s the small matter of getting around region-specific feature-locking by installing custom firmware (at your own risk and acknowledging the legality of usage in certain circumstances), but beyond that it’s been all gravy. A quick search will point you in the direction of various additions sitting in places such as GitHub, but what’s been missing is a central hub for Flipper apps. Until now. The Flipper App Store…

For a long time now, Google has been trying to make the experience of using the web just as intuitive and useful as using a native app. In 2015, the company controversially launched AMP, a framework for building websites that would load quickly, without invasive ads and other bloat. Now the company is proposing a web-based solution to the other major advantage apps have over the native web: security. Unlike viewing a page in a web browser, the app experiences on both iOS and Android are heavily locked down, restricting what information flows in and out. Google is promoting something similar for the web. “At the moment the web is very relaxed and casual,” said Terence Eden, a veteran open standards campaigner and consultant. “I, as a server, can send…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in M2 Pro power from £2,699 from apple.com/uk All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. REVIEW Issue 342, p48 ALTERNATIVES Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304) The perfect 13in laptop? At 1kg, it packs power along with 1TB of storage, a top-quality OLED panel and superb battery life. £1,600 from uk.store.asus.com REVIEW Issue 348, p58 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and RTX 4070 graphics. Expensive but top quality. From…

Barry Collins is the King of Ireland, the Earl of Ormond, the head of House Briain and the former ruler of PC Pro. @bazzacollins How’s your CV looking? I’ve just added a new achievement to mine: “United Ireland, without losing control of Ulster or sleeping with any members of my immediate family.” I’ve not done this in real life, I hasten to add, before the Orange Order start marching past the Future Publishing offices. However, I think it might be easier to unite the real Ireland than it was to do so in Crusader Kings III. CK3 (as it shall henceforth be referred to) is one of the most brilliantly entertaining, addictive and downright complicated games I’ve ever played. I’m almost reluctant to call it a game, because it makes…

Sidekick is a browser with a purpose: it’s designed to provide a distraction-free environment for work. Specifically, it’s designed for people with ADHD, such as the browser’s inventor Dmitry Pushkarev, but that doesn’t mean it should be pigeonholed as a browser for people with special needs. “Whatever works for people with ADHD would also work for pretty much anyone else,” said Pushkarev, who has a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford and who co-founded Moleculo, a genome-decoding tech that was eventually acquired by Amazon. Sidekick aims to keep users focused on the job in several ways. First, it attempts to save you from having to flick between different apps on the desktop by creating a sidebar of web apps that runs down the left of the browser screen. In the…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit ourindex at pcpro.link/index PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com When you think of Asus’ Vivobook range, affordable laptops probably spring to mind. So you may wonder what’s going on here: a Vivobook costing £2,500? Surely that’s more Asus ROG gaming laptop territory? Dig into the specs and it sounds like a gaming machine, too, with a turbo-fuelled Core i9 matched with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics. Here, though, Asus has creators in its sights rather than gamers. It comes loaded with Nvidia’s Studio drivers, a Pantone-validated OLED screen and even a clever dial built into the touchpad. But let’s start with the fundamentals: power. ■ Top guns, part one It’s easy to get blasé about such things, but…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,684 (£2,020 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Aurora R16 is in Alienware’s latest line of gaming PCs, but while its Aurora R15 sibling screams “gaming PC” with its futuristic design, the R16 wouldn’t look out of place in an office. Don’t be deceived. This rig has power where it counts, mixing Intel’s latest CPUs with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs. And all that power won’t cause the R16 to melt or run loud thanks to Dell’s attention to detail when it comes to thermals. As ever with Dell, there are plenty of configuration options, but you may not be able to pick exactly what you want due to supply-and-demand issues for graphics cards. At the time of going to press, the base option included a Core i7-13700F, an…

PRICE 128GB Wi-Fi, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com If you’ve already read our reviews of the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra and S9+ then you’ll know exactly what to expect of this 11in tablet. It’s a premium device from the inside to the outside, with no signs of compromise. Its biggest weakness is arguably also its advantage: size. Without a case, the S9 is a slip of a thing at 498g and it measures a compact 254 x 166mm. That means you can easily hold it one hand while scrawling notes or doodling using the supplied S Pen. Handwriting recognition is by no means perfect, but it’s a fine way to splash down ideas when on the move. The OLED screen has similar properties to both of its siblings. It’s…

PRICE £108 (£129 inc VAT) from logitech.com Logitech’s branding is confusing: head to its website and you’ll see the Zone 100 Wireless, Zone 125 Wireless and Zone Wireless, all of which look identical. What distinguishes the no-number Wireless from the others is that it’s certified for multiple “meeting and calling platforms”, including Teams, Google Meet and Google Voice. When you buy, you choose your preferred platform (“UC” or Teams). Logitech says it also “works easily” with Zoom, RingCentral and GoTo, with controls on the earcup for call answer and end, volume and controlling music playback. You don’t get active noise cancelling, but the Vibe Wireless includes a noise-cancelling microphone. Neatly, this tucks out of the way when you aren’t on a call (or you wish to mute yourself), folding back…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Two pack, £500 (£600 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk (B0BKTDPWC8) If you want the fastest router or mesh performance, you need Wi-Fi 6E. However, to get the benefit you also need Wi-Fi 6E-compatible devices – and while the recently approved networking standard is increasingly popping up in new phones and computers, it’s far from ubiquitous. Rather than focusing on those newest devices, TP Link’s Deco XE200 mesh takes a more inclusive approach. It uses regular 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 for all devices on your main home network, while employing highbandwidth Wi-Fi 6E radios for backhaul communications between the two mesh nodes. When I say high bandwidth, that’s not just a turn of phrase. The Deco’s 6GHz radios support connection speeds of to 4.8Gbits/sec, and each station includes a massive…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 256GB, £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung’s latest folding phone isn’t hugely different to last year’s Galaxy Z Fold4 (see issue 337, p74) – but then it’s not intended as a direct upgrade. It’s more a fresh attempt at winning over smartphone shoppers who haven’t been persuaded to try the new format. And there’s no doubt that the Fold5 is Samsung’s most tempting foldable yet. That starts with an updated design. The Z Fold5 comes in three colours: Icy Blue, Cream or Phantom Black. The chassis is thinner than the Z Fold4, measuring only 13.4mm thick when closed, compared to 15.8mm for the previous model. This has much to do with a new streamlined hinge, which enables the phone to fold up completely, with no gap…

PRICE 8GB/128GB, £483 (£579 inc VAT) from nothing.tech The Nothing Phone (2) is the successor to last year’s Phone (1) from UK manufacturer Nothing Technology (see issue 336, p72), and it continues the futuristic design theme. The standard model comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage; there are also 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB options, in either white or dark grey. It’s a more substantial handset than the original, similar in size to an iPhone 14 Pro Max, but it doesn’t feel oversized. I was surprised by how easy I found it to use one-handed, with small details such as the curved edges of the glass on the back ensuring a comfortable feel in the hand. The main distinctive feature of the first Nothing Phone was the light-up “Glyph interface”…

PRICE £108 (£129 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk You can buy exotically named 15.6in portable monitors from Amazon for £100, but there are good reasons to pay extra for well-known brands. Brands such as MSI, with its history of producing high-quality desktop displays. However, when paying £129, you must set your expectations low. This is a 6-bit panel that’s only capable of producing 16.7 million colours through a technology called frame rate control (FRC). The result is subdued, covering 57% of the sRGB gamut at best. That equates to 41% of DCI-P3, so this isn’t the screen I’d reach for to watch Netflix. Despite this, MSI provides a Movie mode to accompany Black-White and Office modes. Office is the best choice for brightness, peaking at 296cd/m2, but greys are blown out…

Tests are carried out on a Windows 10 desktop virtual machine hosted on a server with a 10Gbit symmetric fibre link. We connect to endpoints in the UK, Netherlands and USA. These are used to download content from reference servers physically located in London, Amsterdam and New York respectively. We do this via HTTP using curl at the Windows command line. All paid-for VPN services, which are unlimited, download around 600MB of data, to allow us to observe variations in download speeds over time. Free services, many of which have data or speed caps, are tested using a 65MB file. At the time of testing, the test VM’s reference connection speed to a nearby data centre was 510Mbits/sec. That’s actually slower than the fastest VPN’d speeds we saw in more…

PRICE Standard, £10 (£12 inc VAT) per month, £48 (£58 inc VAT) for first year (renews at £79 (£95 inc VAT per year)) from nordvpn.com NordVPN always puts in a strong performance in our speed tests, although this time it was outpaced by its corporate sibling, Surfshark, as well as rivals ProtonVPN and ExpressVPN. Nonetheless, a top speed of 306Mbits/sec to UK endpoints is nothing to be sniffed at. Nor is throughput of 211Mbits/sec via the Netherlands and 200Mbits/sec to the Eastern US. NordVPN also provided trouble-free region shifting for media-watching purposes across iPlayer UK (so you don’t have to use split tunnelling to watch while remaining securely behind your VPN), Netflix US and Amazon Prime in the US. NordVPN has endpoints in 60 countries. That’s not as many as…

PRICE £10 (£12 inc VAT) per month, £37 (£44 inc VAT) for first year (renews at £47 (£56 inc VAT) per year), £47 (£56 inc VAT) for two years (renews at £47 (£56 inc VAT) per year) from surfshark.com Surfshark was the clear winner of our speed tests this month, with throughputs of up to 427Mbits/sec faster than its nearest rival. This isn’t just a one-off, either: Surfshark is consistently one of the fastest VPN providers around. The fastest speed we saw was 741Mbits/sec from its Netherlands endpoint, while the slowest was 402Mbits/sec from the US. It didn’t do quite so well when it came to region-shifting, however. It was wobbly when streaming iPlayer, requiring two reconnections and cookie clearing before we could watch the service. This may be because…

PRICE Free for 10GB per month, Pro $9 (around £7) per month, $69 (£54) per year from windscribe.com Windscribe famously has a generous 10GB per month free tier, which is what draws a lot of users to the service. However, its paid-for Pro service is also great value, at $9 per month or $69 per year. At current exchange rates, that’s around £7 and £54, with the latter working out at £4.50 per month. There are no hidden renewal fees, concealed VAT or other unpleasant surprises here, and the Canadian VPN is conspicuously independent. Although Windscribe allows a theoretically unlimited number of devices to connect simultaneously on paid-for subscriptions, you can only have five WireGuard connections operating at a time. When a sixth device attempts to connect using that protocol,…

PRICE £849 exc VAT per seat (billed annually) from logmeinrescue.com It may have rebranded itself last year, but GoTo hasn’t forgotten its LogMeIn roots and offers a diverse range of remote support products. Its cloud-hosted Resolve is aimed at SMBs, whereas the LogMeIn Rescue on review targets larger businesses seeking additional helpdesk, contact centre and branding capabilities. Pricing is simple to understand. It’s based on seats or technicians, and you can make big savings with yearly subscriptions – one seat costs £849 as opposed to £1,224 for monthly billing. Mobile support is optional, though, with seat upgrades costing an extra £25 per month when billed annually. Deployment starts at the Rescue cloud portal, where you create master administrators than can access everything and standard administrators that manage groups of technicians.…

PRICE £421 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Small businesses, home workers and reception desks short on space will love Epson’s latest A4 desktop scanners, as they’re the company’s first to deliver a U-turn paper path. The WorkForce DS-C490 on review is the flagship in this family of four models and packs plenty of document digitising features into a footprint that’s only 296 x 104mm. Despite its minuscule dimensions, the DS-C490 is remarkably capable, teaming up a 40ppm colour 300dpi scan speed with duplex single-pass scanning. The 20-page automatic document feeder (ADF) has a telescopic paper holder and it can handle paper weights from 40gsm to 413gsm. In U-turn mode the scanner sits almost vertically, but if you want to scan bulkier documents, you just pull the release lever out from the…

Henceforth I am to be known as J. And our esteemed magazine shall be P. It seems that one-letter names are the new hip nomenclature, and that the distillation down to a singular letter is the very definition of efficiency. It doesn’t matter that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. We could be more international in our viewpoint and add in the Greek alphabet. Maybe the Russian one, too, although that might be fraught with political difficulties. Using the Chinese character set is even more tempting: I have read that the Zhonghua Zihai dictionary contains 85,568 Chinese characters, while the Yìt zì Zìdiăn dictionary lists 106,230. The problem is that even this isn’t enough for all the hip companies in the world, and typing those characters on a…

In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I’m reminded of this when building a software development team. Regardless of your time in the industry and your breadth of experience, one person alone can’t hope to have enough up-to-date knowledge of what is needed in every discipline: think front-end/back-end dev, quality assurance (QA), UI/UX, business analyst (BA), product management and project management. Perhaps you’ve been asked to build a temporary team to deliver a project, or you’ve joined a startup where a new team is needed. Maybe you’re rebuilding or scaling an existing team. Whatever the scenario, you need giants whose shoulders you can stand on. Often, you’ll get unsolicited views on…

Ihave long believed that politeness is the death knell of progress. Not mentioning some aspect of a system design because you’re afraid you’ll put noses out of joint is a sure-fire way to a massive argument years down the line. Never mind the bruised egos, the offence taken or the principles discarded: often, the most hotly defended parts of a design or requirement are the parts you absolutely must understand. As my rule goes, always follow the sound made when things are swept under the carpet. In this case, we kept being sent benchmarks by the software support house showing how amazingly fast its product ran when presented on a bleeding-edge gamer box. These days that means something with a Ryzen 9 CPU and a slot on the motherboard that…

Features Windows special: what happens next? Windows 10 goes end of life at the end of 2025 while Windows 12 is rumoured for release in late 2024. We explain your options, what we’d like to see in the next OS and AI’s likely role. Tiny11: how to upgrade Tying in with our Windows special, we reveal why some Windows 10 users have been tempted to use Tiny11, a stripped-down version of Windows 11 that can run on only 2GB of RAM. Visual Studio: part two This month we covered the basics of creating a Visual Studio app using Visual Basic. Next month, Darien explains how to create a graphical user interface. Labs Laptops for business Whatever your budget, whatever your rollout size (even if it’s just you), look out for…